AniTV:
"The Escape"
Basic Plot:
The Animorphs
have discovered a secret weapon to use against the Yeerks - maple-flavored oatmeal! The
Yeerks crave it, and when they eat it, they are unable to control their hosts! But to use
the oatmeal weapon successfully, the Animorphs will have to return to their darkest
nightmare...the Yeerk Pool!
Based
on:
Animorphs #17: The Underground. Title derived from #15.
Nitpicks:
I thought that after "The Message," Paulo would be included in the opening credits as Ax. No such luck. He's not considered a main character and stays behind on most of the missions.
This may be a matter of personal preference, but I think it's cooler for Rachel to save a supposed lunatic from suicide and find out about him from her lawyer mother and go to the hospital by herself to investigate than for them to see him freaking out over oatmeal at a diner.
People who are not all right upstairs, even seemingly sweet, harmless people, should not be wandering the halls of a mental institution.
They entirely cut out the part about the oatmeal being a double-edged sword. It is a drug that forces the Animorphs to decide which is worse: the regular slavery of being a Controller, or a break from it, with free will and some body control, except with a maddened creature raving inside you which occasionally takes control of you and has *no* chance of leaving. That's why the Animorphs never, ever even consider using the oatmeal again. But in the show it's just a "weapon against the Yeerks." That's it. The reason the guy in the mental hospital gets the bad end is because some Controllers come to re-infest him (though how a Controller could remove a Yeerk any more than a regular human I cannot say). I will not make any comments on the thermos.
"The cheeseburger with extra cheese" could have been to avoid a lawsuit, (instead of a Happy Meal with extra Happy), though it seems that a sponsorship-deal with McDonalds would have been to AniTV's advantage. Oh well.
The Gleet Bio-Filter scans lifeforms by analyzing their DNA using an exterior scan. There's no way it could detect the Yeerk within if it couldn't find flies in a cow's nose. Which also brings us to the "ear-scan" in the "Between Friends" episode, which I didn't mention there because the list was so long anyway.
Most animal experts agree that ferrets could never dig that deep, especially that quick (it took moles a week, which gives you an idea how much dirt is between the ground and the Yeerk pool).
Someone please tell me how a hawk got through that ferret-hole and/or the Gleet biofilter.
The water-balloon thing was kind of cute. But I still want to know how they got them to fit. And I know Andalite arms aren't as good as ours, but are you telling me that someone who is a virtual walking dictionary of alien stuff, the only arsith allowed on the Dome ship Starsword, didn't know the meaning of the word "throw"?
Pool security is way too good for a bunch of humans to be sneaking around, especially humans who morph concealed only by a few shadows, to get out alive and stay that way for long.
What is Visser Three doing in his human morph? This is the last place any innocent humans are going to see him and be freaked out by his red-eyed Andalite self. We saw him in some lab as an Andalite earlier, so all arguments of him being a human nothlit are off -- for now.
Come on! We want to see hunter-killer robots!